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Dis-aggregation. It’s a word that strikes fear into the hearts of some, and gets others jumping in excitement about the opportunities. On the fearful side lie vendors that are seeing open software solutions eat into their previously cozily aggregated plays. On the networking front is Cisco who, no matter how they spin it, face a dire threat from the direction of the Software Defined Networking world. On the compute side, what VMware did to server makers with virtualization might possible be happening to them by new approaches that reduce the need for virtual machines. And in storage there are plenty of vendors looking to combine commodity hardware with open or closed source software to throw vendors like EMC and NetApp off their perches.

But within all this lie traditional vendors who are finding ways to lessen the damage that this disaggregation is causing – it’s always interesting to see what they’re doing. An example today from Dell and VMware who are announcing an interesting solution, powered by arguably one of the key networking kingmakers, Cumulus Networks.

First some context – previously, networking vendors like Juniper and Cisco delivered tightly integrated networking stacks that included proprietary hardware and software all tunes to work together. Fast forward to today and vendors like Cumulus are breaking that apart. Cumulus offers an open source networking operating system, that allows organizations to buy inexpensive commodity hardware and together deliver a software defined networking (SDN) solution at a fraction of the price to what the big vendors generally charge.

That’s a threat to Cisco and Juniper but an opportunity to companies like VMware and Dell who are facing their own issues closer to home. So if you’re a Dell you see the opportunities to be gained by using Cumulus as the link between your own switches and the VMware NSX network virtualization solution. Dell wants to sell more kit, VMware wants to prove its agnosticism and Cumulus? Well Cumulus wants to prove the point that being the glue in the middle is an important part of the solution. This announcement builds on the Dell/Cumulus announcement from earlier this year. The benefits of this open source route are obvious. As I wrote earlier this year:

In terms of cost savings (and, after all, open source solutions are predicated on some economic advantages) pricing on the Cumulus-run kit is around 25% lower than for boxes running proprietary operating systems – not a bad benefit given the other positives Cumulus brings (no lock in, flexibility etc).

Of course this is a pre-announcement and Dell only expects to roll out physical product later on this year. But as a warning shot over the bows of the traditional networking vendors it’s one relationship to watch closely.